Love and Relationships as a Spiritual Path in the 21st Century: A Jungian Perspective

In her forthcoming book, Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, Jungian analyst, Polly Young-Eisendrath, expresses hope about love in the 21st century, but she also feels significant concern due to the enormity of the challenge we are facing.

Personal love—that is, love that we feel within—has changed over time, according to Polly. In this day and age, we seek some very specific outcomes in our relationships that have not always been sought in “traditional” relationships.

Unfortunately, relational trauma can occur when we perceive that the partner we have chosen to witness us is failing us. Dissatisfaction then leads us to see the “other” as the source of our unhappiness. Trauma, however, can allow new developments to take place as old structures break down. We need to “bump up against one another” in relationships in order to become conscious—to see the patterns at work in our lives, to understand ourselves, and to define meaning.

If we look at it from a larger spiritual framework, we can perceive that love between equals allows us to work more closely with consciousness as a relational field…